computoman

Controlling leds can be a real challenge, unless you know how to use a bit shifter aka the 74hs595. Oversimplified here, but one you get the gist of it only the sky is the limit. From wikipedia:( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_register ) In digital circuits , a shift register is a cascade of flip flops , sharing the same clock , in which the output of each flip-flop is connected to the "data" input of the next flip-flop in the chain, resulting in a circuit that shifts by one position the " bit array " stored in it, shifting in the data present at its input and shifting out the last bit in the array, at each transition of the clock input. More generally, a shift register may be multidimensional, such that its "data in" and stage outputs are themselves bit arrays: this is implemented simply by running several shift registers of the same bit-length in parallel. Shift registers can have both parallel and serial inputs and outpu...

With new technology, there is always some challenges going from an old platform to a new one. Years ago, worked in an independent computer store. This was long before ethernet and the networking that makes things so easy to transfer files between systems. One of my customers who was a college professor wanted to transfer data files from his old eight bit Atari computer to the new Atari. Of course, I volunteered to copy the files to the new system. To copy the files, you had to use what is known as a null modem connection. To make things even more complicated, the way the files were saved were different in that every system had it's own ascii table. For instance, the letter "a" normally would be stored as the number 65. Not all characters were stored as the same numbers between systems. Transferred the files as text between the systems to let the terminal programs do worst of the translation between the systems. For some files though, all but one character was co...